Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux "The Trivium"


Opening Friday, April 19th, 2002, 7 - 9 p.m.
Exhibition dates April 19th - June 1st 2002
Opening hours Wed - Fri 1 - 7 p.m., Sat 1 - 6 p.m.


Galerie Kamm is proud to present the Los Angeles based artist Edgar Arceneaux (1972).

In his drawing installations, Arceneaux investigates the individual as well as the collective memory, by combining elements from his own personal background and his daily environment with extracts from literature and music. The installations defend barriers of time, spanning over several centuries, and sampling from European as well as American history.

In "The Trivium", Dante's Divine Comedy and the philosophy of Socrates meet free-style hip-hop and improvisational jazz. A trajectory of interlocking narratives has been triggered by the coincidence of buying two records on which the name Pharoah occurs - a bebop jazz CD featuring Pharoah Sanders, and a hip-hop CD by Pharoahe Monch. The play on words and names is characteristic of Arceneaux's work, and he often employs linguistic strategies in his installations' mixture of clearly structured - and improvised stream-of-consciousness approaches. "The Trivium" consists of texts and drawings on vellum, loosely attached to the wall. The vellum and the presence of tools employed when drawing, such as rulers and tubes of unused paper, unveils the process, and it is impossible to overview the installation in one glance. This adds a certain intimacy, further stressed by the fact that the text-fragments are slightly unclear, and the viewer has to come closer, in order to discover the many layers of the work.

Arceneaux takes on the role as an improvisational, however structured free-style sampler, all contradictions included. The process is forefronted as most important, and the overall rhythm seduces one to further investigation, as the beat goes on and on...

At the moment Arceneaux is showing at the Kunsthalle Basel, where he is taking part in the exhibition "Persönliche Pläne", as well as participating in the exhibition "prophets of boom", the collection Wilhelm Schürmann, at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, from the 14th of April.